Centre county Pennsylvania, USA | Some folks argue that "heuristics" is superior to number crunching. That argument is described in this copy/paste snippet from Newsweek, Nov 20, 2007:
"[ One of the leading challengers to the dogma of decision making is psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, whose new book "Gut Feelings" collects a convincing body of evidence for the power of hunches over laborious data crunching. Hunches, gut feelings, intuition—these are all colloquial English for what Gigerenzer and his colleagues call "heuristics," fast and efficient cognitive shortcuts that (according to the emerging theory) can help us negotiate life, if we let them.
Consider the "take the best" heuristic. "Take the best" means that you reason and calculate only as much as you absolutely have to; then you stop and do something else. So, for example, if there are 10 pieces of information that you might weigh in a thorough decision, but one piece of information is clearly more important than the others, then that one piece of information is often enough to make a choice. You don't need the rest; other details just complicate things and waste time.]"
Here is link to "the rest of the story":
http://www.newsweek.com/id/71514/page/1 |
Thinking about data..
